View full sizeJoshua Gunter, The Plain DealerAs the bars let out on West Sixth Street at 2:30 a.m. last Sunday, police push people up the block in a "sweep" designed to clear the street. It's one of several tactics police are using to maintain order in a neighborhood seeing larger and younger crowds.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- As a hot Saturday night segued into a warm Sunday morning, West Sixth Street pulsated like a PlayhouseSquare musical rising to its climax.

Music fired out of nightclub doorways and rained down upon a cast of thousands. Young people coursed up both sides of the block and clustered in throngs of 100 or more in front of popular clubs.

Guys called to laughing girls. People crisscrossed the street shouting into cell phones. Police kept the scene moving and swirling, playing their role in the deception.

The happy street was, by 2 a.m., a tense and forbidding place.

A bachelorette party labored to support the bride-to-be, who fell drunkenly off her high-heeled shoes. Security guards moved up the sidewalks, dislodging underage young men who view the street as a hangout. Police rushed to break up fights before they escalated.

The popularity, rising diversity and late-night madness of West Sixth Street reminds many of another place and time. Stakeholders in the Warehouse District whisper "Flats East Bank" and shiver. They worry the city's premier entertainment district could, like its riverfront predecessor, crash under the weight of excess and controversy.

"What people in the Warehouse District are saying is, 'We don't want another Flats,' " said Tony George, a nightclub developer who helped to build the Flats and whose son is a building and restaurant owner on West Sixth. "What they mean is, they don't want to end up like the Flats. People are scared. I'm scared."

The Warehouse District, Cleveland's party central for nearly a decade, is in the thick of a stressful summer. For the past five weeks, an unprecedented deployment of police has sought to keep the merrymaking peaceful on West Sixth, which observers say is attracting a larger, younger and rowdier crowd.

Police warn they are nearly overwhelmed. Club owners and business-group leaders say new rules and strategies are needed. Cleveland's albatross, the race issue, complicates efforts to address the new realities.

Joseph Carey, 61, the white owner of a commercial roofing business on East 55th Street, said his West Sixth Street restaurant, Jac's, lost money for three years before he turned the space into the dance club Lust. He did not envision a hip-hop scene. Promoters suggested it, he said. The largely black clientele that filled the club also filled his cash registers.

"This neighborhood is no longer a restaurant venue," Carey said. "It's a nightclub venue. I changed to a nightclub and that turned things around."

View full sizeThe PDA patron inside Sin nightclub watches the street scene from a second-floor window early Sunday morning in the Warehouse District.

Carey also introduced the Warehouse District's first metal detectors at the door, hired DJs who play angry rap music, and turned up the volume.

Complaints started from the loft apartments above, in the Grand Arcade condominiums, and spread up the block.

Lust, which enforces a dress code, draws a diverse and attractive crowd inside. It's the crowd outside, the people too young or too underdressed to get in, who alarm the neighbors.

The new hip-hop scene draws young black men who hang out on the street into the wee hours. They stand in groups in front of XO Prime Steaks and the Blue Point Grille and present a dilemma.

"Most of these people are at least 18," said 3rd District Police Commander Calvin Williams, now a fixture on West Sixth on Saturday nights. "They can't go into the clubs and drink. So they hang out here."

Observers of the block said the "underagers" do what idle young men tend to do. They try to talk to women. They try to look tough. To get into fights and attract the police and scare off the diners and date-night couples.

"You have more and more coming every week," said Eddie Robinson, a veteran of six years of security details in the district. Robinson, a large black man with a soft voice, directs security at Barley House, one of the most popular clubs on the block.

"They hang out on the street, smoking weed, and they're harassing people who do go into the clubs. And it's causing a problem," he said.

The PDLust nightclub survived efforts to close it after the NAACP came to its aid. Neighbors blame the hip-hop club for excessive noise and for drawing an underage crowd to West Sixth Street.

Carey's landlords, who say they were surprised to find a hip-hop club in their building, had nearly succeeded in evicting him before Carey called George Forbes, president of the Cleveland NAACP.

He demanded a meeting with Mayor Frank Jackson and alerted the news media to a new pattern of racism in the city. Meanwhile, Carey filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court.

Carey's landlords blinked. At a hearing Friday mediated by a federal judge, representatives of West Sixth Associates agreed to drop eviction efforts, to overlook that Carey's lease expires in August and to extend it for another year.

Carey, in exchange, agreed to send his security staff outside to clear the sidewalk: to keep the hangout crowd moving.

Lust lives on, a mini-drama in a larger narrative.

At 2 a.m. last Sunday, 18 police cruisers formed a crooked line up the center of West Sixth, a wall of security meant to send a message. Commander Williams stood in the street in a golf shirt, a gun holstered to his hip, a radio in his hand.

Maintaining control with dress codes

Dress codes have come a long way from No Shirts, No Shoes, No Service, especially in the Warehouse District, where clubs scramble to keep abreast of fashion -- and to stay ahead of trouble.

The admonition "No wifebeaters" posted at the entrance to Barley House is not aimed at abusive spouses. It means no sleeveless T-shirts, popular with a new generation.

The dance club Lust forbids baggy jeans and "excessively large chains" and makes a point to stress "NO FLAT BILL HATS" -- as in baseball caps.

You can keep your cap on at Barley House, but the dress code insists the cap bill be pointed straight forward or straight back. A cap skewed to the side is a gang insignia, or once was, or maybe still is.

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